The Cuil search engine isn’t that great after all, but it deserves a chance to grow before we conclude on whether it has a place in the market.
The real issue of Cuil is not about competition in the search engine market. It’s great to have competition, at least good for users in terms of having more choices. Industry wise, Cuil raised concerns on whether those inside the industry got their priority right. More importantly, if the investors got their priority right.
Take a look around on the internet. Are there any real urgency to have more competitions in the search engine market, or there are more important things we can do? In other words, is there anything else needed competition more than google, or yahoo?
There are quite a few and it’s not too hard to spot them.
In priority order, they are
- Ebay
- Second Life
Does anyone look shocked when reading this? I hope not. Is there anyone game enough to raise a few more for us to agree or disagree? 
If Cuil’s investor didn’t get their priority right, then we should make all efforts to avoid following their act unless you have a few million pocket money and don’t quite know what to do with them.
So are the three listed above bad technology?
No. In contrast, they are good technologies which all soar to popularity for different reasons. People have fun socializing in Facebook, trade in ebay, have fun and even start a new virtual life in Second Life. They are so good and they are part of people’s lives.
The relationship between users and the three are quite different from people’s relationship with Google. You may hear people say ” I can’t live without google” “I love google” But when you think about it carefully, loosing Google isn’t comparable to loosing, say Facebook.
The key different is the degree of co-production.
Say you have been using google to search the net everyday for two years, suddenly you can’t access to google any more. Are you going to loose much you have? not really, you just go to Yahoo, msn search, Alta vista or whatever search engines available. Life goes on as usual.
But if you have been using Facebook to socialize everyday for two years, it would be a different story when you suddenly found you have no access to it. “I just change to MySpace” Did you just say that? No you didn’t and I hope nobody did as that would be completely naive.
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